Making the activity innovative
What counts as innovative
- The standard's definition is wide and specific at the same time: originality, invention, commercialisation or improvement, with reference to business formation, functions, people, management and environment.
- Read that carefully. The innovation does not have to be in the product. It can be in:
- Formation — how the business is set up and owned. A cooperative, a social enterprise, a partnership with an iwi or community organisation, a structure that returns surplus to a cause.
- Functions — how it produces, markets, sells or finances. Pre-orders instead of stock, subscription instead of one-off sale, direct sale instead of retail, a production method nobody in the area uses.
- People — how it is staffed and organised. Rotating leadership, roles allocated by strength rather than by position, employing people others do not employ.
- Management — how decisions are made and measured. Open books, decision-making by consensus, measuring success against four outcomes rather than one.
- Environment — how it uses and returns resources. A waste stream turned into an input, a refill or take-back scheme, materials sourced from something otherwise discarded.
Making an ordinary idea genuinely innovative
- Most student activities begin as an ordinary product — food, clothing, a printed item, an event, a service. That is fine. The innovation is what you do to it.
- Four questions that reliably find one:
- What does everybody in this market throw away? Turning a waste stream into an input is innovation in the environment dimension, and it is usually cheap.
- What does everybody in this market assume has to be true? That you need stock before you sell. That customers pay after delivery. That production has to start before you know demand. Break one of those.
- Who is not being served? A product adapted for a group everyone else ignores is originality with a market attached.
- What is the most annoying part of buying this? Removing it is improvement, and improvement is in the definition.
- Improvement counts. You do not need to invent something. The standard names improvement explicitly, so a meaningfully better version of an existing thing qualifies — as long as you can say what is better and for whom.
Evidencing the innovation
- The innovation must be visible in the plan and in the pitch, not asserted at the end.
- Write it as a claim you can defend:
- What is new or improved — precisely
- Compared with what — the existing alternative
- Why it matters — what it does for the customer, the cost, or one of the four outcomes
- What it risks — every innovation carries a risk, and naming it is what makes the claim credible
- Worked, on an invented activity:
- Kete Kai (invented student activity) makes soup from vegetables that a local grower cannot sell because they are the wrong size or shape for supermarket specification.
- What is new: the input is produce that currently goes to stock feed, bought at a fraction of wholesale price.
- Compared with: every other soup producer, which buys graded vegetables at market rates.
- Why it matters: the ingredient cost is roughly a third of a conventional producer's, which is what makes the price achievable, and the produce is diverted from waste.
- The risk: supply is unpredictable, because the grower cannot guarantee how much off-specification produce there will be in a given week — so the recipe has to work with whatever arrives.